Lupita Nyong’o in Taut Horror Prequel

Joseph Quinn and Lupita Nyong’o in “Quietly: Day 1.”

If you want to breathe new life into a horror film built around silence as the only way to survive an alien invasion, there are countless worse ideas than moving the story from a small American town to a crowded one from New York. The opening text of an aerial view of Manhattan accompanied by the cacophonous sounds of car horns, sirens, and screams informs us that the Big Apple has an average sound level of 90 decibels, the equivalent of a human scream. The setting alone makes the film tense and consistently terrifying. A quiet place: first day an intense experience that skillfully extends an enduring franchise.

Lupita Nyong’o excelled at drawing us into the fear of her character in Jordan Peele’s scary film. We, so her captivating lead performance here as a woman trying to stay alive while already living on borrowed time is no surprise. The biggest question was whether Michael Sarnoski could follow up his assured feature debut, Pigwith something just as distinctive.

The short answer is a resounding yes. The second-year writer-director adapts to the demands of the genre, skillfully maintaining tension, peppering big scares throughout, and earning our emotional investment in key characters. Not a cat anymore. But he also finds space to infuse many of the qualities that elevated his 2021 vehicle Nicolas Cage, including control, restraint, compassion and the purring engine of a film that is as much a melancholic quest tale as it is a thriller about mortal peril.

John Krasinki’s sleeper hit in 2018, A silent placebegan on Day 89 of the alien attack before jumping to over a year later, focusing on a loving family struggling to cope with their grief and stay safe in life-threatening circumstances.

The rest of 2021, A Quiet Place, Part 2, continued its story but added a 10-minute prologue set on the first day, during which families attending a Little League baseball game watch with concern as what looks like a meteorite hurtles through the sky and has a nearby impact. As parents still rush to get their children home in a state of growing panic, spindly cabbage-headed creatures with deadly claws descend en masse, moving at breakneck speed to pounce on and slaughter any human which emits a sound.

The new film reflects this chaos in a setting not conducive to silence. Sarnoski begins patiently, introducing Nyong’o’s Samira who makes a surly contribution to her therapy group at a hospice just outside of town. If her angry resignation isn’t enlightening, then her transdermal fentanyl patches clearly indicate she has terminal cancer, while her behavior suggests she never expected to stay this long.

The kind nurse Reuben (Alex Wolff, meeting Sarnoski after Pig) considers himself Samira’s friend even if she scoffs at this notion. But he persuades her to come to a group outing to a New York puppet theater, using the promise of pizza on the way home as motivation. Cradling her inseparable service cat, Frodo, she barely finishes the first act of the puppet show before heading out. When Reuben tells her that they have been instructed to return to the hospice as soon as possible due to an undeclared city-wide emergency, she is pissed that he reneges on his promise of pizza.

As a pre-titles sequence, these establishing scenes are vivid and involving, dispensing with unnecessary exposition. What’s most striking is that when a meteor shower hits Earth, the city explodes almost instantly, and as Samira exits the hospice bus into a blinding cloud of white dust, the images inevitably evoke haunting associations with the rain of ash that covered Lower Manhattan. 9/11. She takes refuge inside the theater with Reuben and a family led by Henri de Djimon Hounsou. But a devastating tragedy soon follows.

Despite the chaos and confusion, it is quickly established that the alien predators are blind and only react to noise. The mobilized military also quickly realize that the creatures cannot swim, which triggers a plan to evacuate by ferry from South Street Seaport. But headstrong Samira insists on heading to Harlem, battling a wave of stunned New Yorkers who move downtown and sometimes get shot when they inadvertently make a sound.

It gradually becomes clear that Samira’s former home is in Harlem, and that her determination to get a piece of her favorite pizzeria has deep personal meaning stemming from a happier time in her life.

Seeing New York crawling with vicious monsters – climbing on buildings and leaving giant gashes in their walls, while the streets are lined with burning car wrecks and destroyed storefronts – makes a big impression.

Sarnoski and a cutting-edge visual effects team position these scenes in the best tradition of alien apocalypse films. But they acquire an additional dimension thanks to the disturbing spectacle of impetuous and noisy Manhattan, shocked into a heartbreaking silence. Every sound seems heightened, and each sudden noise sends you a jolt accompanied by a shiver of dread, an effect made amplified by the understated use of Alexis Grapsas’ relatively minimalist score.

The other notable character, who enters the case well, is Eric (Joseph Quinn), a young Englishman who has gone to study law in New York. He is found by Frodo, emerging petrified from a flooded subway stairwell, then follows the cat to Samira.

In a genre reversal of the usual disaster movie dynamic that’s never pushed too hard, Samira is the tough, unsentimental one, telling him that he must join the mass exodus heading south, while Eric is at first helpless, shaken to his core. They form a temporary bond in his apartment, their conversation – and even their screams – muffled by the din of a violent storm. But even when the natural intimacy of strangers brought together by tragedy blossoms between them and Eric musters enough wit to display chivalry. and worry as Samira’s health continues to fade, the character is never as mundane as a White Knight protector.

Production designer Simon Bowles and cinematographer Pat Scola (who was also responsible for the brooding beauty of Pig) Take full advantage of the opportunities offered by New York. Places we automatically associate with care and comfort, like a hospital, become potential death traps when noise causes aliens to crash through glass walls and skylights. A cathedral serves as a place of respite, despite a massive hole formed by a creature crashing into its tiled floor and another torn from its frescoed dome.

One of the most captivating set pieces takes place underground in a subway station, where an alien uses its long, agile limbs to run along the walls of a flooded tunnel while Samira and Eric, pulling Frodo on a mini- hastily improvised game. raft, are carried away by the surging waters.

It’s a long way into the film before Sarnoski, working with editors Gregory Plotkin and Andrew Mondshein, releases the tension long enough to learn a little more about the protagonists. But even without the poignant insights into Samira’s journey and the revisiting of places dear to her in the past, she and Eric are fully dimensional characters. The actors’ chemistry produces a deeply moving impact in their tender final scenes, made more powerful by their silence.

Rising star Quinn, a British stage actor best known for his television work such as the fourth season of Stranger Things or Kenneth Lonergan’s adaptation of End Howards, shows the benefits of choosing a face we don’t already know in a film series. His sensitivity is so acute and his large brown eyes so full of sensitivity that Eric’s ingenuity and constant courage almost take us by surprise.

Wolff and Hounsou bring soul to the supporting roles, while Nyong’o carries the film on his very capable shoulders. Never underestimating the paralyzing terror that governs Samira’s every movement, the actress conveys the conflict between the character’s bitterness and her humanity, remaining tenacious and decisive even when her body begins to seriously betray her. She keeps you in suspense throughout the film.

The other star is Frodo, a screen cat who always ranks with Odysseus from Inside Llewyn Davis or Jonesy from Extraterrestrial, played by two big black and white felines named Nico and Schnitzel. He has the gentle and cuddly nature of a assistance cat but also the eccentric curiosity to explore precarious situations and feed the anxieties of his humans.

Sarnoski has done a commendable job of putting together a spin-off that plays by the rules of the first two films by staying focused on the smallest possible group of main characters while spreading the scare factor and suspense across a much larger canvas. It also avoids the trap of overexplaining anything, making the terror here arguably even more primal than previous films, in which the characters had strategic help knowing that aliens are sensitive to high-frequency sounds, forcing them to retreat. .

It’s not often that we are treated to a post-apocalyptic saga that remains so personal, so in touch with human loss as something that is not only forgotten during the next jump scare, but has the possibility of lingering, an aspect which survives the abandonment of parents who protect their children. The third chapter of A silent place shows that this smart and scary series, which began with a modest…